Hands-on: Find My Friends is Apple’s Google Latitude

Apple has released Find My Friends, the company's own version of Google …

Apple has expanded upon its Find My iPhone service—now included for free as part of iCloud for anyone with an Apple ID—to launch a new service called Find My Friends. If you are familiar with Google Latitude, you're already familiar with the basic functionality of Find My Friends—other iOS 5 users can choose to share their location with you and vice versa, allowing the service to display their locations to you on a map.

Blurred to protect my friend's privacy—this person shared with me, not all of you!

This sounds stalker-ish, and as a current Google Latitude user, it is to some degree (it's certainly only for the most trusting of relationships, or perhaps the most untrusting, depending on your perspective), but Apple has taken a couple extra steps in order to make sure users feel as comfortable as they can when using the app.

While Google Latitude allows you to turn your location sharing off and on at any given time—and you can also restrict certain users to more general locations, like city-level—Find My Friends does all of that plus temporary location sharing. The scenario described by Tim Cook during Apple's recent iPhone event was that of going to the beach with a group of friends—friends who may not normally share their locations with every other member in the group on a daily basis. You can set up a temporary "event," we'll call it, within the app and then add people to the event. From then on, members of that group will share their locations with each other until the set expiration time, when everyone's privacy settings will return to their previous presets.

This allows groups to find each other easily when they need to (I can imagine using this at a concert or a race, where it's next to impossible to find the people you're looking for) and keep their locations to themselves when they don't—all without having to change privacy settings. Participants in the group only need to agree to temporary events in order to be included, simplifying the overall process of deciding whether or not to continue sharing where you are with certain individuals.

You can find these controls under Settings > General > Restrictions

Apple also took an extra step to add Find My Friends into the iOS parental controls. By doing this, the company is allowing parents to turn on the feature on their children's devices (presumably iPod touches, but you never know!) and not allow them to turn it off. So if you have a kid with an iOS device, you can truly keep track of everywhere he or she goes—up until the point where your kid learns how to hack the device, jailbreak it, and remove everything you've ever tried to set up, that is.

Overall, we like the thought that went into those extra privacy details. Both Latitude and Find My Friends aren't very deep in their functionality, so there's not much more to say about either of them. They are what they are: apps that enable you to look at the locations of your friends and family at any point, assuming that they are sharing that information with you.

Find My Friends only works under iOS 5, so you'll be able to run it once Apple releases iOS 5 to the public later today. Go to iCloud.com from your iOS 5 devices in order to get the download link.

I'm with you on that. I know it isa personal preference, but the use of simulated organic textures in electronic devices has always grated on me. I think my biggest pet peeve in that regard is bookshelf apps that try to look like a wooden bookshelf. Blech.

Any way to disable this remotely, short of wiping the device? If I ever lose my phone, I would prefer that whoever finds the phone not be guided to all my friends with iOS 5. Granted, I'd probably wipe it anyway, but I would probably disable FMF right away even if I thought I just misplaced my phone somewhere and would eventually find it.

Who else thinks that the skeuomorphic, hand-stitched "leather" themed UI for Apple's new 'Find My Friends' app is less to do with making it look pretty, and more about making the purpose of the app seem less creepy. Imagine if the same app was all digital and "tron-like" (as Google would do it) you'd immediately think it was *more* hacker/stalker-ish... right?

(And yet colored icons in the Finder and iTunes are eliminated, for some reason?

Heh, good point. You'd think they'd be working towards an integrated experience. Although iCal received the leather treatment in Lion, which makes it even worse. Yeah, let's give a single program the leather treatment, yet keep the same theme for everything else.

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Why the leather anyway?

I think they're going for the expensive leather-bound notebook look. Then again, having worked for some lawyers with expensive tastes, they always went for black leather. I don't know of anyone that would go for this light brown leather look on their personal organizers.

The 'Come Get Me' app has been doing this and more for a while. It allows you to post your position, or the position of somewhere to meet as an event that others can join for a short while. Then it shows you where everyone who has joined that event is in real time. Damned useful for organizing meet ups or bar crawls. You wanna find out where a certain mass of friends are? Just join the event. Wanna get the secret location of the rave, have someone text or email you the event link. You wanna know if the person you're meeting is going to be late because of traffic, make an event.

And best yet, you can put your own private event server, and point users there. No big brothery crud.

I didn't know the majority of people (at least on ars) doesn't like the stitching/leather look. I know its personal opinion but I prefer it. Why apple refuses to incorporate themas tho is beyond me. 3 party devs could make some great stuff and put a modest price tag on them and sell through itunes/app store. Guess the jail break community will continue to thrive as long as apple refuses to give people what they want.

Any way to disable this remotely, short of wiping the device? If I ever lose my phone, I would prefer that whoever finds the phone not be guided to all my friends with iOS 5. Granted, I'd probably wipe it anyway, but I would probably disable FMF right away even if I thought I just misplaced my phone somewhere and would eventually find it.

You have to log in with your Apple ID in order to see anything within the app. Presumably a thief doesn't know your Apple ID or password, but even if he/she did, you could change it from another device and lock him/her out.

Does this work in the background, or do I have to launch the app periodically for people to see where I am?

As far as I can tell, it does update in the background, but I'm not sure of the frequency of updates (yet). Google Latitude's app for iOS also updates in the background, but from personal experience, it doesn't update very often. (As in, it might update once every couple hours unless I launch the app to force it to refresh my location.)

So how accurate is this? Assume it would work ok for example at Disney world, but how about at the mall? Is it within 10ft, 100ft? Provided it can get a GPS fix at all that is.

Just as accurate as the location service in iOS is, it all depends on your ability to get good GPS signal or good cellular signal or a place with up to date WiFi location data.

Where I am right now (indoors, four bars reception) in my apartment it shows my location with an error of about two to five meters.

Cool, that's pretty good. I don't own a smartphone so really have no idea how accurate any of the location services is. I think my ipod touch just uses IP so not really comparable, and I have it turned off anyway. I might be to paranoid to use this anyway though..

Who else thinks that the skeuomorphic, hand-stitched "leather" themed UI for Apple's new 'Find My Friends' app is less to do with making it look pretty, and more about making the purpose of the app seem less creepy. Imagine if the same app was all digital and "tron-like" (as Google would do it) you'd immediately think it was *more* hacker/stalker-ish... right?

Now you've made me want a creepy digital design for this app. Add in a red dot that follows the green dot around and a couple wireframe helicopters, please!

Does this work in the background, or do I have to launch the app periodically for people to see where I am?

As far as I can tell, it does update in the background, but I'm not sure of the frequency of updates (yet). Google Latitude's app for iOS also updates in the background, but from personal experience, it doesn't update very often. (As in, it might update once every couple hours unless I launch the app to force it to refresh my location.)

Thanks! That's been my biggest complaint with Latitude. Hopefully this will update a little more often.

I'm with you on that. I know it isa personal preference, but the use of simulated organic textures in electronic devices has always grated on me. I think my biggest pet peeve in that regard is bookshelf apps that try to look like a wooden bookshelf. Blech.

Glad to see that I'm far from the only one who feels that way.

Please, for the love of god, stop with the cheesy skeuomorphic interfaces. What on Earth is wrong with the world that I wish more companies (including Apple, no less!) would emulate Microsoft's design sense? How is that even possible?

There are already a couple cellphones that allow parents to track their kids. The kids I've seen aren't interested in hacking the device though... they just tell their parents they're going to the movies with friends, then ditch their phones in the bushes outside the theater. 2-3 hours later, they wander back over and dig through the dirt until they find their phones.

It doesn't show that the kids value the device much, but they probably didn't pay for it, and they probably won't have to pay for the replacement should someone else get clever and start searching bushes for phones to steal.

Does this work in the background, or do I have to launch the app periodically for people to see where I am?

As far as I can tell, it does update in the background, but I'm not sure of the frequency of updates (yet). Google Latitude's app for iOS also updates in the background, but from personal experience, it doesn't update very often. (As in, it might update once every couple hours unless I launch the app to force it to refresh my location.)

Thanks! That's been my biggest complaint with Latitude. Hopefully this will update a little more often.

Even better - whenever I check on the location of a friend, it reaches out to their phone, gets their current location and then presents it. Always accurate without having to drain your battery pushing your location when nobody cares. I guess you could kill someone else's battery constantly checking their location, that'd be interesting...